Longinus

In order to understand the complexities of the new rhetorical concept of obscurity it is necessary first to discuss the extent to which it is informed by relevant conceptions of obscurity in the influence of classical rhetoric on the new rhetoric. Of particular importance in this context is the connection between obscurity and the orator’s ability to effect a pre-reflective movement of the audience’s passions, for the new rhetorical interest in psychology was largely underwritten by a similar preoccupation with this power. While clarity is essential for conveying information, in classical rhetoric it is obscurity that is deemed the most powerful instrument of influence or recipient-formation, and is the foundation for that elevation or heightening of passion which is a product of the best poetry and the most sublime speaking. As I will show, this power is contingent upon three interrelated aspects of the new rhetorical concept of obscurity - mystery, deceit, and the appeal to the pre-reflective - and it depends for its success on the use of figurative language. The grounds for a legitimate exploitation of pre-reflective influence involve a concept of inspiration by an external divine spirit which was universally represented as positively divine. The shadow hanging over this exploitation of obscurity, however, was the possibility that possession by the divine might in fact be indistinguishable from possession by the demonic. Virtue and vice are rhetorically indistinguishable and therefore interchangeable in the relevant writings of classical rhetoric which were re-appropriated in the new rhetoric, and the problem of interchangeability informed the eighteenth-century philosophies of classically trained thinkers like Lowth and Burke in addition to ‘[a]ll the Romantic (male) poets [who] were educated… in the art of rhetoric as a staple part of their curriculum’.⁸

Longinus’ Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime, by virtue of its late seventeenth-century re-introduction into rhetorical discourse, functioned doubly as a new voice for a psychologised rhetoric and a voice of classical authority. As Timothy Clark has observed, ‘[t]he rediscovery of Longinus’ first-century treatise of rhetoric and poetics… at the end of the seventeenth century provided, in effect, a neutral or secularized theory of inspiration’.⁹ While On the Sublime participated in a rhetorical tradition involving divine inspiration as the source of the orator’s virtue and authority, its emphasis on an instrumental manipulation of the audience belies Tom Furniss’s distinction between rhetoric and Burke’s new rhetorical interest in physiology when he claims that ‘[o]ne of Burke’s central rhetorical strategies [in the Enquiry] is apparently to abandon the Longinian concern with rhetoric in order to focus on physiological responses to natural objects’.¹⁰ On the contrary, a secular, psychological potential was a nascent and pervasive element in the uncomfortable quasi-theistic mythology of On the Sublime, present in the form of an instrumentalism which ‘refers sublimity to what now reads as a peculiar mixture of psychological states and rhetorical devices’.¹¹ Although dating from about the first century CE, it was the 1674 French translation of Peri Hypsous by Nicolas Boileau (which has been called ‘the most important translation of the neoclassic age’¹²) that made Longinus ‘a household name’ for the following 150 years,¹³ though this influence was undoubtedly perpetuated in part by William Smith’s 1739 English translation. Although most considerations of Longinus and his influence are justifiably preoccupied with his treatment of sublimity and the subordination of obscurity to a discourse of clarity,¹⁴ a focus on obscurity shifts the discussion to Longinus’ postulation of poetry and rhetoric as dependent for their power on the manipulation of pre-reflective passion, a point which was particularly important for eighteenth-century rhetorical and indeed literary theories.¹⁵ The language of the sublime poet and the sublime orator is not the language of instruction, or the clear representation of reality, but rather that which associates obscurity in conception with participation in a divine order. Grounded in an immediate reaction which suspends knowledge and the understanding, the sublime effect is dependent on the function of obscurity as a veiling of that designing aspect of art and rhetoric which renders audiences suspicious and therefore critically conscious. Thus Mehtonen argues that Longinus ‘insists that greatness of style rests on the ability of the writer to conceal his techniques and devices beneath their very brilliance’.¹⁶

Longinus problematises nominal support in rhetorical theory for clarity as the primary guarantee of a speaker’s virtue by arguing that the power of rhetoric is based on the ability to move an audience against or without its will. Rhetoric and poetry both derive their primary power from this ability to subdue an audience through deliberate concealment or mystification, the positive value of which rests in the guarantee that elevated speech is divinely inspired. This subjugation of the recipient is contingent upon the use of ‘elevated’ language and imagery, or the sublime. The

effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. At every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer.¹⁷

This power is closely allied with the use of figurative language, as it ‘possesses great natural power’ which contributes to the sublime by not allowing ‘the hearer leisure to criticise the number of the metaphors because he is carried away by the fervour of the speaker’.¹⁸ The use of figures like metaphor generates a level of indeterminacy and diminishes the ‘leisure’ necessary for critical labour, since it involves a mode of speech which does not descend to earthly, straightforward description. Obscurity is the source of sublimity and elevated speech is obscure all the way down, and it produces a pre-reflective suspension of that understanding which might lead the audience to question what it hears. For Longinus, while clarity is sometimes useful in rhetoric as a mode of instruction, obscurity, as indeterminacy and the suspension of judgment, is the basis of control.

But for Longinus the obscurity of the figurative is not necessarily sufficient for subduing critical labour, since figures threaten to draw attention to the speaker’s artificial designs upon his audience, corrupting the sense of honest communication from the divine. The solution to this possibility of poetic or rhetorical failure depends not on the speaker’s abandonment of figure, but on the ability to obscure his own obscurity by blinding the audience with a profusion of images. Thus the ‘art which craftily employs [sublimity and passion] lies hid and escapes all future suspicion… by the very excess of light’.¹⁹ The sublime speaker is dependent on hiding his own figures ‘whose art [passion and the sublime] throw into the shade and as it were keep in concealment’.²⁰ The sublime, in other words, is not the primary instrument of elevation, but rather a secondary instrument of concealment. This inscription of a doubled deceit into nature of the sublime is ultimately related to the final goal of the sublime speaker, which is to elevate the audience, ‘inflaming our ardour and as it were illumining our path, [carrying] our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of sublimity which are imaged within us’.²¹ Deceit and mystery, two essential elements of obscurity, are in this context characterized as benevolent, insofar as the sublime speaker leads his audience to realize, by a receptive participation in divine discourse, the potential sublimity within themselves.

But as Mehtonen remarks of Longinus, he was aware ‘that good and bad things often well up from the same source’.²² The subversive potential for a speaker to deliberately misuse his ability to obscure his art and suspend the just suspicions of his audience, or in other words to be possessed by a demonic rather than a divine spirit, must therefore be vitiated by a nominal metaphysical connection drawn between sublimity and greatness of character:

it is absolutely necessary to indicate the source of this elevation, namely, that the truly eloquent must be free from low and ignoble thoughts. For it is not possible that men with mean and servile ideas and aims prevailing throughout their lives should produce anything that is admirable and worthy of immortality.²³

This metaphysical injunction serves not only to justify the speaker’s manipulative abuse of obscurity, but also to produce in the audience a veneration for the obscure speaker himself, as opposed to his speech alone. The poet’s sublime style – grounded on a concealed obscurity - is here asserted to be an indelible sign of his character. Thus D.A. Russell observes that Longinus ‘treats “height” as a product not of technique but of character’.²⁴ The sublime speaker’s divine character is the condition for the possibility of his elevated language, which is once again figured as an ‘echo’ of a transcendent, eternal structure, for ‘in discourse we demand… that which transcends the human’.²⁵ For Longinus, the power of the orator - a power underwritten by various techniques of obscurity, especially an obscured obscurity - is underwritten by a nominal or metarhetorical participation in the hierarchical order of the universe itself.

Significantly, Longinus neither acknowledges nor resolves the problematic implication that even the virtuous function of obscurity is grounded in a form of deceit fundamental not only to the figurative itself, and to the strategy of the orator who exploits the indeterminacy which is the source of his power. The new rhetoric thus appropriated as a central document concerning the sublime style a text which, in fact, in its preoccupation with control, ‘describes not a manner of writing but an effect’.²⁶ The nature and origin of the sublime itself remained obscure, but Longinus covered over this problem by performing his own principles: both the sublime and On the Sublime are reflexively grounded in a strategy of concealment and indirection based on an appeal to the reader’s own desire to participate in the sublime, and ‘the sum of [Longinus’s] approach is an appeal to moral pride’.²⁷ The obscurity of the sublime was supplied by a persuasive metarhetoric about the sublime. As Russell also remarks, ‘no critic widely read before L[onginus] came into fashion laid as much emphasis as he does on the personality of the poet; more important herein than his stress on moral excellence as a prerequisite of great writing is his frequent use of the metaphors of inspiration and enthusiasm’.²⁸

This unacknowledged, contradictory assertion of the virtue of deceit, coupled with the metaphysical assertion that a great style is a natural sign of greatness, or participation in a benevolent, divine, transcendental order, left unanswered the possibility of an indiscriminate imitation of the elevated style. It also initiated a pattern of obfuscating reflexivity in which a text covered over its fundamental hollowness with a false fullness of commentary about its own content. And this sublime, transcendental cheat was founded on the appeal to the recipient’s moral pride in a groundless greatness that is a guarantee of his own virtue. Together with the eighteenth-century, secularised reception of Longinus which would focus on the personality of the speaker as the guarantee of his possession by or participation in a naturalised or scientific discourse of truth, the potential obscurity at the heart of Longinus’s discourse on and of sublimity would later haunt Coleridge’s development of the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity and, indeed, Romantic concepts of poetic genius. As John Hamilton puts it, ‘[i]n a word, [obscurity] bestowed upon the poet’s work the coveted aura of genius’.²⁹

A metarhetorical text which reflexively illuminates its own instruments of deception or obscurity carries with it certain consequences detrimental to its success. Though he is strangely (or perhaps disingenuously) unaware of the effect of this problem for his own project, Longinus refers to it by discussing its effects on the work of another author. Deftly characterizing a too-revealing passage from Isocrates’ Panegyric as a type of ‘hyperbole’ which must be avoided, Longinus asserts:

[t]he theme of his Panegyric is that Athens surpasses Lacedaemon in benefits conferred upon Greece, and yet at the very outset of his speech he uses these words: ‘Further, language has such capacity that it is possible thereby to debase things lofty and invest things small with grandeur, and to express old things in a new way, and to discourse in ancient fashion about what has newly happened.’ ‘Do you then, Isocrates,’ it may be asked, ‘mean in that way to interchange the facts of Lacedaemonian and Athenian history?’ For in his eulogy of language he has… published to his hearers a preamble warning them to distrust himself.³⁰

Longinus’ claim is that revealing the negative potential of language to be appropriated and used for as it were unnatural ends undermines the authority of the text in which such a claim is made. Yet his own characterization of the sublime as grounded in forms of deceitful obscurity, however justly applied, and even his inclusion of Isocrates’ statement itself metarhetorically belies his own vindication of ingenuous elision. The representation of rhetorical manipulation is also a presentation of rhetorical manipulation. It is a peculiar fact that the particular rhetorical problem which Isocrates relates - the inversive, interchangeable appropriation of the language of an old tradition for the elevation of the new and unprecedented - was to become a central preoccupation in the 1790s Reflections controversy in Britain, with the language of the French monarchy and the English constitution taking the place of Athens, and the language of the revolutionaries and radicals taking the place of Lacedaemon.